Habitat banking: a solution to compensate development projects?

Even in period of crisis development projects are carried out many times as a strategy to boost the economy. Demands for investment in, for instance, transport, energy, health and education come from the need to replace existing infrastructure and for additional infrastructure to support new ways of working and living for an increasing population and to support economic development. New infrastructure development can bring significant economic and social benefits, including the opportunity to build in such a way as to meet the demographic explosion challenges and to enhance sustainability. However, it can also have significant costs on the environment, related to its construction and use. Such environmental damages can be addressed through the planning and design processes and projects aimed to restore and compensate the lost environmental benefits. According to the Environmental Liability Directive (EDL) for the European Union appropriate measures to compensate the damage should be taken into consideration when deciding how to remedy environmental damages (EU, 2004/35/CE). Different methods exist to assess natural resource injury and execute adequate compensation projects that give back, to the extent possible, the lost environmental services. The present research aims to determine the role of Habitat Banking (HB) as a potential instrument to facilitate the compensation of the environmental damages caused by the infrastructure development. Habitat Banking is an important emerging mechanism for conserving environmental services and biodiversity (Latmier & Hill, 2012; Tietenberg & Lewis, 2009). Furthermore, the HB offers solution to compensate damages where on-site mitigation could be difficult (Environment Bank LTD, 2012) or when the remediation measures may take long time to give back the inured environmental benefits. Thus, the hypothesis of this research is that habitat banking can provide adequate compensation solutions to offset the environmental damages and lost ecosystem services caused by infrastructure development projects, according to the environmental compensation normative enforced. Using the concept of environmental credits, compensation projects and remediation measures, this research proposes to analyse the implementation of habitat banking as an adequate novel instrument to offset environmental damages caused by infrastructure development. The implementation of HB is being studied in selected local case-studies, and the research result will be presented and discussed.